» The City Gardener; Gardening in our dreams

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As the old saying goes, ninety per cent of gardening happens in the mind

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Right now, my garden isn’t that much to look at. But through the blanket of dried leaves, mulch, compost and dead flower stalks (not to mention odd bits of trash blown onto it from the street over the winter), I see a bright future.

You don’t have to look closely to see the noses of the first tulips and daffodils poking up through the mulch like little green periscopes.

Here and there, a crocus or two is blooming already, and by mid-April there will be Technicolor patches of them all over the garden. And there’s a faint but definite green tinge on all of my trees, shrubs and vines.

Every year at this time I say the same thing: this is the year I will finally achieve the perfect garden I have dreamed of all these years. I will spend more time out here working on it – what deadlines, what chores, what nagging back and creaking knees?

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And I will be rewarded with every gardener’s Holy Grail: a consistent, unceasing succession of rich bloom from April to late October, with fatly blooming shrubs, exuberant flowers of every hue, perfectly symmetrical foliage plants – a fragrant paradise, from front walk to back fence.

The reality is never anything like that, of course. And yet that’s a large part of what keeps us amateur gardeners going year after year.

What the legendary English gardener Gertrude Jekyll called “creating pictures with flowers,” always starts with imagining how a pair, or a group, of different types and colours of plants would look together and then trying it out and seeing what happens. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t; but it’s the dreaming that keeps us going.

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Well, go ahead and dream, because this is the time of year to do that. What it is not, is the time to get down to any serious gardening. Not yet.

In fact, early spring is when your garden soil, along with all the tiny creatures that live in it, is at its most vulnerable, and the kindest thing you can do is leave it alone. Let it have those last few precious moments of sleep before it gets to work for another year.

Come the first truly warm day, and you’ll be tempted to rake up all the detritus from last fall and expose the soil, thinking the warmth of the spring sunshine will do it good. But in fact, what you are doing is exactly the opposite: you’ll be drying it out and possibly damaging it.

Nights here in southern Ontario are still very cool, sometimes even frosty. What’s more, decomposing winter mulch has a lot of good stuff in it – from beneficial insects and microbes to nutrients that will feed newly emerging shoots under the surface.

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What you can do now is carefully push back the mulch an inch or two from the tips of emerging spring bulbs, using your gloved fingers. It makes the mulch easier to remove when the time does come, and it makes the bulbs look better when they come into bloom.

Once your lawn has firmed up enough to walk on, you can gently rake to help get the blades pointing up again and remove any leftover leaves from last fall. Don’t be too vigorous about it, though, or you’ll disturb baby grass shoots just starting.

If you have to plant something or you’ll die, confine your efforts to your planters, flower boxes and urns, perhaps with ready-mades from the nursery.

By late April, you can start putting in half-hardy annuals (I’ll tell more you about that next time).

But for now, just gaze out over your acreage (or, in the case of my mid-town Toronto garden, one-eighth of an acre), and dream of glories to come.

Please feel free to write in with questions, to comment or to share your own city gardening adventures
with Martha. Write to her at marthasgarden07@gmail.com.

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